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Citizen polling at Five Thirty Eight
November 3, 2008
I have been a sceptic about “citizen journalism” and the suggestion that a swarm of amateur eye-witnesses will take over from professional reporters. So I should acknowledge the success of one site that combines semi-professional expertise with a dollop of eye-witness reporting.
That site is Five Thirty Eight, a three-person operation that has produced an array of insights into the US presidential (and Senate and House) elections this year.
Five Thirty Eight (the name comes from the number of votes in the electoral college that formally decides on the next president) was established by Nate Silver, a baseball statistician, who has been meticulously collating and analysing polls this year.
He has done this using sophisticated modelling and statistical techniques and appears to me to have been a model of reason and clarity. His unpaid work (although Five Thirty Eight takes advertisements on its site) reads at least as well, if not better, than that of many professionals.
Five Thirty Eight has become a leader among polling aggregation sites (the other best-known sites being Pollster and Real Clear Politics. It is favoured by Democratic-inclined bloggers as an alternative to the supposedly right-leaning RCP (which, by the way, also has a lot of high-quality data) and Mr Silver is a Barack Obama supporter, but he seems scrupulous in his analysis.
Of course, one must add the proviso that RCP is predicting a solid Obama victory and has been minimising the degree of poll-tightening towards John McCain, so it could end up with egg on its face on Wednesday morning, along with most of the media, if Mr McCain wins.
The other proviso is that Mr Silver is not doing any polling himself. He is, like other internet sites, taking information from others and then adding analysis and opinion on top.
Be that as it may, Five Thirty Eight has also been featuring some interesting reportage on organisation on the ground in tightly-contested states. This has been done by Sean Quinn, a self-described “poker player” who has travelled around states reporting on activity at local campaign offices.
Five Thirty Eight has picked up a lot of traffic as a result of this combination of analysis and reporting, and deservedly so. I am not sure that it quite counts as citizen journalism, but it is definitely not journalism as we have traditionally known it.
Of course, the flood of interest in sites such as Five Thirty Eight and political blogs is unlikely to last far beyond the election (despite the optimism of those running them). I am sure Mr Silver could parlay his success into a job as a professional analyst but his site’s future is less certain.
Oh, c’meon John don’t be so stodgy. Some of us have been doing a form of blogging that combines reporting with expert analysis for five or six years now.
Posted by: Helena Cobban | November 4th, 2008 at 3:44 am | Report this commentDon’t forget Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium. It’s on a par with Five Thirty Eight.
Posted by: Bill Russell | November 4th, 2008 at 5:42 am | Report this commentJohn, I thought professional journalists were the ultimate researchers. In this case, solid research is sadly lacking. I am Australian, I live in Australia and I have never visited the US, yet even I know that Nate Silver is a highly respected Baseball analyst and partner in his own company - Baseball Prospectus. His Fivethirtyeight website is my first choice of online information for the US Election because I know full well that it is neither red or blue, but independently purple. This election will affect the rest of the world, and accurate, unbiased information is what the rest of the world is looking for. Forget Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Zogby, RCP and others - Fivethirtyeight tells it like it is, without party or brand spin.
Posted by: Captain Obvious | November 5th, 2008 at 12:56 am | Report this comment